The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [19]
PART TWO
Argil and Mold
1
In the early briefings of his staff, Major General Edward Cummings, commander of the troops on the island, had described Anopopei by saying it was shaped like an ocarina. It was a reasonably accurate image. The body of the island, about a hundred and fifty miles long and a third as wide, was formed generally in a streamline with a high spine of mountains along its axis. On a line almost perpendicular to the main body of Anopopei, the mouthpiece, a peninsula, jutted out for twenty miles.
General Cummings's task force had landed on the tip of this peninsula, and in the first few days of the campaign had advanced almost five miles. The initial wave of assault troops had splashed out of their boats, run up the beach, and entrenched themselves at the edge of the jungle. Subsequent waves passed their position and filed through the brush along trails the Japanese had cut previously. There was little resistance the first day or two, for the majority of Japanese had been withdrawn from the beach when the Navy shelling began. The early advances were only briefly delayed by a minor ambush, or a temporary defense position set up along a ravine or across a trail. The troops pawed forward gingerly a few hundred yards at a time, sending out many patrols to examine the ground ahead before each company moved up. There was no front line for several days at least. Little groups of men filtered through the jungle, fought minor skirmishes with still smaller groups, and then moved on again. Cumulatively there was a motion forward, but each individual unit moved in no particular direction at any given time. They were like a nest of ants wrestling and tugging at a handful of bread crumbs in a field of grass.
On the third day the men captured a Japanese airfield. It was a minor affair, a quarter-mile strip of cleared jungle with a small hangar recessed in the brush and a few buildings already destroyed by the Japanese, but the Pacific communiques included it, and radio announcers mentioned the victory toward the end of their news broadcasts. The airfield had been taken by two platoons who circled the jungle about it, routed the sole machine-gun squad still defending the clearing, and radioed back to Battalion Headquarters. The nightly defense positions of the General's troops had some coherence for the first time. The General established a front line a few hundred yards beyond the airstrip, and listened that evening to the Japanese artillery bombarding the field. By midmorning the next day his troops had moved forward another half mile up the peninsula, and the front had broken again into sluggish separate globules of mercury.
It seemed impossible to maintain any sort of order. Two companies might start in the morning with perfect liaison between their flanks, and by nightfall would be bivouacking a mile apart. The jungle offered far more resistance than the Japanese, and the troops tried to avoid it wherever they could, threading their way along creekbanks, forging trails through the comparatively uncluttered wilderness of natural coconut groves, and moving with pleasure through the occasional clearings of kunai grass. The Japanese in response would shell the clearings at unpredictable hours, so that the troops avoided them finally, and blundered through the uncertain avenues which thinner patches of jungle might provide.
In the first week of the campaign the jungle was easily the General's worst opponent. The division task force had been warned that the forests of Anopopei were formidable, but being told this did not make it easier. Through the densest portions, a man would lose an hour in moving a few hundred feet. In the heart of the forests great trees grew almost a hundred yards high, their lowest limbs sprouting out two hundred feet from the ground. Beneath them, filling the space, grew other trees whose shrubbery hid the giant ones from view. And in the little room left, a choked assortment of vines and ferns, wild banana trees, stunted palms, flowers, brush and shrubs squeezed against each other, raised their burdened leaves to the doubtful light that filtered through, sucking for air and food like snakes at the bottom of a pit. In the deep jungle it was always as dark as the sky before a summer thunderstorm, and no air ever stirred. Everything was damp and rife and hot as though the jungle were an immense collection of oily rags growing hotter and hotter under the dark stifling vaults of a huge warehouse. Heat licked at everything, and the foliage, responding, grew to prodigious sizes. In the depths, in the heat and the moisture, it was never silent. The birds cawed, the small animals and occasional snakes rustled and squealed, and beneath it all was a hush, almost palpable, in which could be heard the rapt absorbed sounds of vegetation growing.